Put your voice in

Ask anyone to describe their own writing and you get adjectives. Direct. Professional. Warm but firm. An AI given adjectives produces text that sounds like everyone who has ever used those adjectives, which is to say like nobody.

What works is evidence. You have plenty, and this lesson turns it into a file.

A few minutes. Collect eight or ten real pieces of your writing: emails you sent, a memo, a proposal, a blunt Slack message you stand by. Recent, and genuinely yours, not the ones a colleague polished.

I connected my Gmail and exported some Whatsapp conversations

Paste them into your AIOS chat and ask for the voice file. The prompt is below. Read what comes back and correct it out loud: I would never open like that. The second rule is right. Add that I do not use exclamation marks. Each correction makes the file more yours.

You have already told an AI a great deal about your work, and it is better evidence than anything you would produce on the spot. Both major apps let you export your history, and both send it by email rather than handing it over on the spot.

• Claude: Settings, then Privacy, then Export data. Usually quick. The download link expires after 24 hours.

• ChatGPT: Settings, then Data controls, then Export data. **This one can take up to seven days**, so start it now and come back to this lesson later.

Two things worth knowing before you bother. On a work account, on either app, the self-serve route may not be open to you: on Claude Team or Enterprise only the workspace owner can export, and on ChatGPT Business or Enterprise there is no self-serve export from settings. And an export only ever contains conversations you still have; anything you deleted is gone.

Pick out five or ten conversations that were actually about work. Then:

And the one worth doing properly, because almost nobody can describe their own writing:

That file beats any style guide you would write about yourself, because it is drawn from what you did rather than what you think you do.

One line in your instructions file makes the voice file part of the harness, the following is an example of my VOICE.md, as you can see it's figured me out pretty well:

Then check it honestly. Ask for a draft of something real, an email you actually owe someone, and read it as the recipient would. Would you have sent it? If not, the file is describing how you think you write rather than how you do. Add the correction and it gets better fast.

Every piece the AI drafts in your voice is one you edit lightly instead of rewriting. The corrections go back into the file, so next month's drafts start closer than this month's. Of everything in your AIOS, this is the file that most visibly pays for itself, because you meet it every time anything you send gets drafted.

Stuck anywhere in this lesson? Reply to any Build Notes email and tell me where. I would rather fix the lesson than have you quietly give up.